Understanding Advertising Adstock Transformations

Advertising effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) are typically measured through econometric models that measure the impact of varying levels of advertising Gross Ratings Points (GRPs) on sales or on purchase decision and choice. TV advertising has both dynamic and diminishing returns effects on sales, different models capture these dynamic and nonlinear effects differently. This paper focuses on reviewing the econometric rationale behind the popularized Adstock transformation model that allows the inclusion of lagged and non-linear effects in linear models based on aggregate data.Advertising, Adstock Model, Non-linear transformation, Marketing-Mix

The Effect of Clock Rule Changes in College Football 2005-2008

Rules can be seen everywhere in our lives. Rules also govern the sports we play. This paper will examine the effects of recent clock rule changes in college football, specifically 2005-2008. These rules seem to have served their purpose, but in doing so, they have created an unfortunate by-product that acts as a negative externality on the competitiveness of the game

Resources for Teaching Secondary School Biology In Bayelsa State of Nigeria

The study investigated the resource potentials for teaching secondary biology in Yenagoa and Ogbia Educational Zones of Bayelsa State. The survey design was adopted. Thirty four (34) secondary school biology teachers from sixteen schools from both private and public constituted the sample. They were randomly selected from the eighty two (82) biology teachers in these zones. Two instruments, namely; Resources for Teaching Secondary Schools Biology (RTSSB) and Biology Laboratory Checklist (BLC) were used to generate data for the study. The data was analyzed using simple percentages and numerical values. The findings indicated that resources for teaching biology were lacking or insufficient on the basis of which recommendations were made for the provision of both material and human resources for effective teaching of biology at the secondary school level. Keywords: Survey, Sustainable Development, Professional organization, Human resources

African perspective to the nature based solutions to climate change.

The natural environment worldwide is increasingly affected by climate change. Among the range of proposed solutions, those provided by nature have been acknowledged worldwide as the most potential. This work attempts to explore the various contexts in which nature based solutions are relevant for climate mitigation and adaptation. The paper identified that a lot of countries in Africa are not giving nature the room it needs to operate in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change. Consequently, the continent lags behind compared to what operates in other jurisdictions. It is against this backdrop that this paper strives to unravel the identified challenges and potential opportunities for increasing the scale and effectiveness of nature-based solution implementation in Africa. This is premised on the infallible assumption that the nature based solution has attained a universal and sacrosanct status which must be respected by all the nations of the earth in their respective national climate targets, known generally as Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement. The paper ends with some recommendations for more active and practical implementation of nature conservation measures in Africa

An appraisal of the mechanisms for the enforcement of environmental laws in Nigeria.

This work attempts to critically evaluate the enforcement of environmental laws in Nigeria. The essence of good enforcement of environmental laws cannot be over emphasized. As a result, a lot of laws, regulations and policies have been put in place to ensure adequate protection of the environment from degradation. These laws provide enforcement mechanisms and penalties for defaulters. A major problem with these provisions is lack of enforcement which made them almost unknown or unheard of especially in the rural communities where these laws are abused with reckless impunity. The discourse also examines the enforcement of environmental laws in other climes in comparison with the current realities in Nigeria. Finally, it suggests a review of the legal framework for the enforcement of environmental laws as well as sentencing guidelines in Nigeria

KupRite: Get Your Dishes Done Right

74% of household dishwashers owners report having small/light weight cups flip, not get clean, and fill with water

Further Characterization of the Mitigation of Radiation Lethality by Protective Wounding

There continues to be a major effort in the United States to develop mitigators for the treatment of mass casualties that received high-intensity acute ionizing radiation exposures from the detonation of an improvised nuclear device during a radiological terrorist attack. The ideal countermeasure should be effective when administered after exposure, and over a wide range of absorbed doses. We have previously shown that the administration of a subcutaneous incision of a defined length, if administered within minutes after irradiation, protected young adult female C57BL/6 mice against radiation-induced lethality, and increased survival after total-body exposure to an LD50/30 X-ray dose from 50% to over 90%. We refer to this approach as "protective wounding". In this article, we report on our efforts to further optimize, characterize and demonstrate the validity of the protective wounding response by comparing the response of female and male mice, varying the radiation dose, the size of the wound, and the timing of wounding with respect to administration of the radiation dose. Both male and female mice that received a subcutaneous incision after irradiation were significantly protected from radiation lethality. We observed that the extent of protection against lethality after an LD50/30 X-ray dose was independent of the size of the subcutaneous cut, and that a 3 mm subcutaneous incision is effective at enhancing the survival of mice exposed to a broad range of radiation doses (LD15-LD100). Over the range of 6.2-6.7 Gy, the increase in survival observed in mice that received an incision was associated with an enhanced recovery of hematopoiesis. The enhanced rate of recovery of hematopoiesis was preceded by an increase in the production of a select group of cytokines. Thus, a thorough knowledge of the timing of the cytokine cascade after wounding could aid in the development of novel pharmacological radiation countermeasures that can be administered several days after the actual radiation exposure

Issues in knowledge representation to support maintainability: A case study in scientific data preparation

Scientific data preparation is the process of extracting usable scientific data from raw instrument data. This task involves noise detection (and subsequent noise classification and flagging or removal), extracting data from compressed forms, and construction of derivative or aggregate data (e.g. spectral densities or running averages). A software system called PIPE provides intelligent assistance to users developing scientific data preparation plans using a programming language called Master Plumber. PIPE provides this assistance capability by using a process description to create a dependency model of the scientific data preparation plan. This dependency model can then be used to verify syntactic and semantic constraints on processing steps to perform limited plan validation. PIPE also provides capabilities for using this model to assist in debugging faulty data preparation plans. In this case, the process model is used to focus the developer's attention upon those processing steps and data elements that were used in computing the faulty output values. Finally, the dependency model of a plan can be used to perform plan optimization and runtime estimation. These capabilities allow scientists to spend less time developing data preparation procedures and more time on scientific analysis tasks. Because the scientific data processing modules (called fittings) evolve to match scientists' needs, issues regarding maintainability are of prime importance in PIPE. This paper describes the PIPE system and describes how issues in maintainability affected the knowledge representation used in PIPE to capture knowledge about the behavior of fittings

Peran Pendidikan Agama Kristen dalam Penggunaan Teknologi pada Anak

Perkembangan teknologi di era revolusi industri 4.0 sebagai peluang dan tantangan bagi pendidikan agama Kristen. Penyalahgunaan teknologi di era ini pada anak akan berdampak buruk pada kehidupan mereka. Pendidikan agama Kristen berperan untuk memberikan pemahaman dan kesadaran pada anak dalam penggunaan teknologi dan bahaya penggunaan teknologi. Peran ini dilakukan di lingkungan keluarga, sekolah dam gereja dengan tujuan untuk mengantisipasi penggunaan teknologi pada anak di era ini. Artikel ini bertujuan untuk mengulas tentang perkembangan teknologi dan tanggung jawab keluarga gereja dan sekolah dalam pada anak dalam kehidupan sehari-hari. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah pendekatan studi kepustakaan, dilakukan dengan mengumpulkan data yang relevan dengan topik atau permasalahan dalam penelitian ini. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa pendidikan agama Kristen di keluarga, gereja dan sekolah memiliki peran penting untuk mengajar, mendidik, membinan, mendampingi dan mendisiplin anak dalam penggunaan teknologi serta menanamkan nilai-nilai spiritual dan moral sehingga mereka tidak terjerumus dalam arus perkembanga

Competitive Pricing Analysis in Mature & Evolving Markets A Time Series Approach

Competitive behavior between players in a mature market can have a different structure than those in growing markets. Pricing component of the marketing mix is less relied upon to expand market share in growing markets, while there is a greater reliance upon product differentiation and building stronger brand equity. On the other hand, in mature markets, there is usually very little scope for product differentiation, so there is a greater reliance on pricing for competitive gains. Since market share expansion in a mature market comes directly from competitive sales declines, pricing strategy changes in one brand leads to a fairly instantaneous reaction from other brands in the category and retail prices in general reflect the equilibrium condition of consumption. This paper applies methods from Time Series Econometrics to identify nonstationary behavior and long-run equilibrium of retail prices of brands in mature and evolving markets. The results indicate that long-run equilibrium in prices may be an outcome of the maturity of markets, as the persistence of the shocks in the prices do not result in the persistence in shocks to sales. The cointegrating condition created by the intense price competition imposes a stationarity restriction on sales, hence eliminating the possibility of any long term pricing strategy and pricing becomes tactical